AUSTIN — The House Elections Committee on Monday approved a bill that would make court-ordered changes to the state’s controversial voter identification law, moving the proposal to the House floor under the looming specter of federal action.

Senate Bill 5, written by Rep. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, would give more leeway to people who show up to the polls without one of seven state-approved photo IDs. They would be allowed to use other documents that carry their name and address as proof of identity, such as a utility bill, if they sign a "declaration of impediment" stating why they don't have an approved ID.

The bill would make lying on the document a third-degree felony punishable by two to 10 years in prison. It would also create a voter registration program that sends mobile units to events to issue election identification certificates.

The committee sent the bill to the House floor on a 5-2 vote along party lines. Democrats in both chambers have opposed the bill, saying it does not go far enough to address the discriminatory issues federal courts have found with the law. When the Senate passed its proposal in March, Huffman said her bill balanced protections against voter fraud with maintaining access to the vote.

Last week, a district court judge in Corpus Christi ruled for the second time that the 2011 voter ID law was written with intent to discriminate against minority voters. It dealt another blow to the state in a six-year legal battle and increased pressure on the Legislature to permanently address the issues.

District Judge Nelva Gonzalez Ramos has said she will wait until after the session ends May 29 to rule on what remedies her court can provide if the legislation isn't satisfactory.

One option would be to put Texas back on the list of states that need permission from the Department of Justice before changing election laws.

A 2013 U.S. Supreme Court ruling took Texas and other states with a history of discrimination off the list. If Ramos moved in that direction, Texas would be the first state to go back under federal oversight since the ruling.

“The litigation is clearly looming in the background there,” said Adam Gitlin, a lawyer for the Brennan Center for Justice, which is representing some of the plaintiffs in the case. “They are aware that now Texas has lost before [several] federal judges in trying to defend this law, and that they have to make changes if they’re going to have a voter ID law that can withstand judicial scrutiny.”

In August, the state agreed to soften the law’s requirements for the November elections after an appeals court found them discriminatory. Those changes were intended as interim fixes while Ramos ruled on other aspects of the lawsuit.

The Republican authors of the bills say they used a July ruling by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that found the law discriminatory as their road map for crafting the legislation. Huffman said in March that the bill was “very fair and should have no discriminatory effect.”

But critics like Rep. Rafael Anchia, the chairman of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus that is a plaintiff in the lawsuit, say the Legislature’s proposal to fix the voter ID law “doesn’t even meet the bare minimum” of the court-ordered changes.

Anchia said Democrats would try to amend the bill on the House floor but it will be up to Republicans, who have a majority in the chamber, to decide whether they are serious about fixing the issues identified by the court. If they do not, Anchia said, plaintiffs in the case would push for Texas to be brought back under federal oversight for election law changes.

“The opportunity is not ours [Democrats], the opportunity is theirs to come up with a bill that doesn’t disenfranchise,” said Anchia, a Dallas Democrat. “We will know very quickly whether or not the House is more flexible and nimble than the Senate in this regard.”

Critics jumped on Ramos’ ruling last week to advance their points. Ramos said the Legislature rejected changes to the law in 2011 that would have softened its racial impact, such as not allowing more forms of photo IDs on the approved list.

During the Senate debate in March, Democrats tried to add student IDs to the list of state-approved documentation for voting but were rebuffed by Republicans. Several other states with voter ID laws allow people to vote with student identification.

Lawmakers tried to address other parts of the court’s recommendations. The Senate bill would increase the amount of time a person could use an expired ID to vote from 60 days to two years.

But critics have argued that the two-year time frame is far less than the four years ordered by the district court in its interim ruling.

“If I were in the majority and a federal judge told me, 'Here’s a template for how it should work in the interim,' I would draw up a bill that matches that,” said Celia Israel, an Austin Democrat who sits on the elections committee. “I don’t know why it’s so difficult to say, ‘Let’s meet the mark of the judge. Let’s not be discriminatory anymore.’

“If the voice of a federal judge mattered, we would have written it differently, and we didn’t,” she said. “I wish I could say the state of Texas had woken up, but we don’t seem to care.”